The unit of time called “week” is fundamental to our belief in the God who created us. Let that sink in for a few moments. In the very first verses of the very first book, the Sacred Scriptures present the story of creation as a divine liturgy, where chaos is tamed by God’s Word and life is given to the universe: “On the seventh day God completed the work he had been doing; he rested on the seventh day from all the work he had undertaken. God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work he had done in creation.”
The order from the days of creation unto the week means that there is something essential about time itself as created by God. While we may consider objects—things and buildings and persons—as holy, thus dedicated to God for a holy purpose, we must always remember that in creating the universe God created time itself. Therefore a complete understanding of holiness necessarily includes the component of time. There is no holiness without dedicating time to that which is holy. Hence, without the celebration of the Lord’s Day, at His command and as a precept of the Church, the days of the week lack an essential component of what makes it sacred.
The liturgical calendar is the structure the Church has given us to keep sacred time. This season of Advent and the upcoming Christmas season offer us more pointed directions for keeping time holy. The devotion that is the Advent wreath, marking off the weeks of the season by the four candles, invites us to enter into a time before paper calendars, a simpler time when time itself measured us, rather than we measured time. Additionally, a crucial turning point in the season comes on the 17th of the month, which begins the octave before Christmas. On this day, beginning with the genealogy of Christ, the Church shifts the focus of Advent from the penitential time needed for the eschaton to a deep dive into salvation history and the birth of Christ.
In addition to the customary role of time in the celebration of our faith, this year’s cycle of gospel readings from Luke offer a rich theology of time. As Deacon Dave pointed out in his homily two weeks ago, Luke carefully situates his gospel in historical time, with details of the Roman Empire, all to lend credence to his presentation of the truth about Jesus Christ. Luke begins his narrative with the story of Christ’s birth, something absent from the Gospel of Mark, and provides a rich theology of the incarnation. Tradition has it that Luke must have heard privileged details from Mary herself regarding Christ’s birth.
Luke not only gives us the chronological background of the Savior, but he frames Christ’s ministry in discrete scenes where God’s action literally jumps out of the undistinguishable background of world history to “kairos”, or the divinely appointed time. People act in haste in the Gospel of Luke. There is no time to dawdle. The time of our salvation is at hand. God has chosen a sacred “now”, the time of the fullness of revelation. Then Luke continues to use time as a major component of his story. With the Acts of the Apostles, Luke shows us how the “time of the Church” began, where Christ’s disciples become faithful witnesses of all they had seen and heard.
Keeping this theological understanding of time in mind, I would like everyone to consider a significant moment in time that we will encounter next year. Wednesday, June 15, 2022, will be the 75th anniversary of the dedication of our parish church. The Roman Pontifical—the liturgical book of ceremonies normally performed by a bishop—indicates that each year the parish celebrate the anniversary of its dedication with the rank of solemnity. Calling a particular day a solemnity means that the nature of the celebrations, indeed the whole day itself, should call forth from us the highest degree of enthusiasm, participation, and attention. Indeed, there are indulgences available for those who participate in the celebrations according to the normal requirements.
In 2022 then, we have the special blessing of celebrating a significant anniversary, what the Scriptures call a “jubilee”. A jubilee extended the Sabbath day of rest to an entire year of purposeful activities, such as allowing fields to remain fallow, forgiving debts, setting prisoners free, and special offerings at the temple. The custom of keeping anniversaries as special occasions comes from this ancient tradition of acknowledging sacred time. Most recently Mary Immaculate Catholic Church celebrated its 125th anniversary in 2011 with a special festivities and a jubilee Mass for the entire parish. The parish began remote preparations this past year with the fitting renovation of the church’s interior. One of the possibilities for celebrating a solemnity like this is to transfer the day to a Sunday, to allow for more people to participate. Bishop McKnight has done this for several years in regard to the patronal feast of the Diocese of Jefferson City, the Immaculate Heart of Mary. This year it isn’t possible to transfer the feast to the Sunday before or the Sunday after since each of these is already a solemnity of the Lord, which has a higher precedence in the order of celebrations. That means that however we celebrate the 75th, it will most likely be on that Wednesday, at least with a special Mass and perhaps a fellowship meal.
Our celebration though for this jubilee need not confine itself to that one day. In the coming months I’ll be working with staff and parish leadership to find ways to incorporate this theme of jubilee into parish life. We will also be looking for opportunities to renew our faith, especially by fidelity to the Sunday celebration of the Eucharist, the source and summit of our faith.
Our journey to become a stewardship parish will be especially blessed by this significant anniversary, when we acknowledge two great instruments in God’s plan of salvation: the time to come to know, love, and serve the Lord especially in the sacraments and the indispensable means by which the Lord makes us holy, the house of God where we come together in His sacred presence. Stewardship begins with a heart filled with gratitude. I look forward to this coming year when all of us can grow in faith and more effectively share the Gospel by giving God thanks for the beautiful church in which we worship and are made into the Body of Christ.